Patch 5.4 Vengeance Change
Ghostcrawler talked about a potential change to how Vengeance works in Patch 5.4 last week, as well as answering a few questions about it.

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Please don't do this. I do not wish to be made back into a simple meatshield. Staying alive and doing good damage is fun.
Your damage will still be fine and higher than pre Vengeance. Tanks don't need to win meters IMO. (Source)

Who benefits from this change? dps who like topping metres?
Healers who don't have to contend with tanks sitting in fires? (Source)

If all that loot didn't get people running 25 mans why do you think vengeance will? I don't get it man honestly.
It's not intended as a 25 perk. The environments are different in terms of DPS and require different numbers. (Source)

I think it's in addition to the PvP nerf tanks are getting theyre working hard to balance PvP and it's PvE
It's not a PvP issue. It's some protection against tanks doing unusual or goofy things to increase their AP to unintended levels. (Source)

Why do you want to make tanking more difficult? I would think with few tanks and healers you would want to make it easier.
Do some quick calculations. Do your tanks hit those numbers regularly without doing things like solo tanking? (Source)If that's your reasoning I guess I understand it. If your goal is to make solo tanking harder this will do it.
We do want to make solo tanking harder on fights intended for 2 tanks. Solo tanking is fun to a degree, but it shouldn't be the right answer to increase DPS or mitigation. (Source)Just want to point out that this change would hurt 10m far more than 25m though, compounding factors involved. I really don't understand why you think the cap in 25m should be higher than 10m even with higher tank damage.
Tanks are a greater percent of damage done in 10s. 1 per 4 DPS rather than 1 per 7 or so in 25s. Which means tanks should care more about their damage in 10s than in 25s which is odd. And because tanks do get hit harder in 25s they need more Vengeance to translate to higher active mitigation. So we think the pitch is sound on those fronts. Where it runs into trouble is that tanks don't have the same health. When the cap is lower, high health tanks will just have higher Vengeance. Furthermore, mitigation not based on Vengeance, such as Death Strike, just become more powerful at the cap. These are problems we'd have to solve if we go through with it, but there should be lots of PTR testing for 5.4. (Source)

Seems like a 180 from what you preached awhile ago, awhen you were fine with it. Why the change in philosophy?
Tank DPS will still be quite high even with this change. Wait for some players to estimate numbers. (Source)

I can't understand, why tanks dps was affected by this feature, if you could have just buffed threat directly.
We like for tank damage to be relevant, and for active mitigation to scale. Vengeance provides all of that in addition to threat. Having huge threat modifiers on low damage abilities was also something tank complained about constantly. It may bug DPS players to get out DPSd by a tank, which is understandable, but that happened in dungeons way before Vengeance. Overall Vengeance still solves a lot more problems than it creates. (Source)

Perhaps the source of vengeance needs to be looked at. Im not sure the complexity but can ground aoe not give it
Yes. We are going to start flagging certain ground mechanics to not give Venegance. (Source)

Random Battleground Healer Balancing Disabled
It looks like the long queue times were being caused by the new balancing system.

Patch 5.3 Hotfixes - May 22

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

General

Players that die and release around the Seat of Knowledge area will now be provided with a Spectral Gryphon (Wisp for Night Elves) or a Spectral Wyvern; allowing them to fly back to their bodies.

Secrets of Ragefire: Fixed an issue where certain situations could cause the Scenario to get stuck on Stage 3.

Items

Enchant Weapon - Spirit of Conquest is now soulbound.

Enchant Weapon - Bloody Dancing Steel is now soulbound.

Battlefield: Barrens

Kor'kron Commanders are now non-faction specific multi-tap for all characters that attack them.

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Elite Gear and Rating RequirementsDon't worry, elite gear tied to rating is coming back next season.
As I understand it, this is indeed the current plan. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Talent Choice Simplicity
Well. To be fair, a lot of people never look up how to spec their characters, and so in those cases the old system probably felt slightly more dynamic. Unfortunately what they didn't know is that their choices were probably wrong. But maybe they don't care that their choices were wrong and their character was suboptimal - that's an honest way to play a game. Not everyone wants to ensure their character is maximizing its output, and it's the look and feel of the system that's more important than its actual effect.

That said, the new trees are still superior in offering competing options and each one can change up how your character plays, and differentiate it from someone else. If you look at build guides these days the suggestions for talents are usually just breakdowns on how each one works and which ones work better in what situations. There generally aren't any clear cut builds because most choices are viable depending on what you're doing. Obviously everyone is going to have favorites, but the fact that talent builds are a discussion instead of a map on how to place points, I think it's worked out quite well.

I'll add in the caveat that it's not perfect, some trees don't offer great options, some options aren't taken very often, and those are things we'll continue to tweak. Overall though we're quite happy with how the new trees have hit the goals we set forth. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Conquest Point Catch UpI've not even done arena on this char in this season, and my cap is only 10k.
This is because the catch up system doesn't function as is explained in the opening post of this thread. The cap you mentioned in your post is actually correct if you have not earnt any Conquest points yet this season, because we are in week 10. The formula is as follows (As Russlad said):

(Week of season x 1000) - Conquest already earned. = Conquest cap

If the result of this equation is a negative or below your normal weekly cap, this means that your Conquest cap will be calculated as it would any other normal week.

If you weren't 90 during those weeks you missed don't get any extra points from what I understand. Seems kinda buggy, my SP that has missed loads of weeks didn't get a bigger cap either but granted it has full gear.
This is incorrect. If a character dinged level 90 this week, their cap would be the same as a character that has been level 90 since patch 5.2 but has not earned any Conquest points this season. You do not miss out on cap for weeks of the season that you were not level 90 for. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Blue Tweets

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

FuturePlease dont nerf flying because of a small minority sport like world pvp.
We like the MoP solution for now - no flying while leveling with some no fly zones on top of that. (Source)

Consider adding a LFD-style bag system to LFR. Dps get shorter queues, tanks and healers get occasional rewards. Everyone wins
We might. (Source)

How long do you think your expansion design methodology (new continent, new class/race, 3 new herbs/ores/cloth) can last?
I think players want to see some new gameplay too and not just new iterations of the things they've seen before. (Source)
Even if they aren't for you, challenge modes, pet battles, the farm, scenarios were all new types of ways to spend time. (Source)

Not saying it’s bad, I like it…just feels totally different.
The 5.0 talent design will stick around for awhile. We agree that leveling is missing frequent rewards though. (Source)
The *current* talent design feels pretty solid to us. We'll iterate but no overhaul plans. #famouslastwords (Source)

Why not spend time optimizing existing game systems like crafting instead of adding new systems that eat up developer time?
Ideally we try to do a little of both. Some players get bored of the old systems even if they are very well polished. (Source)

A patch used to include dungeons and raids, not a patch is just balance and dailies.
Dragon Soul came with few new boss models and virtually no new architecture because of the 3 dungeons included in that patch. (Source)
By contrast, Throne of Thunder has a lot of new boss models and a lot of architecture. It came at the expense of no dungeons. (Source)
Is there a happy medium? Can we do both? Perhaps. It's something we will work on in the future. (Source)
Now granted many players enjoyed the heck out of those dungeons. But others were quite candid about the raid. (Source)This makes me believe that dungeons take a lot more effort than many peeps realize. oO Loved the Eternity one.
The architecture (the physical dungeon) takes a very long time. The encounters take time too, but usually less. (Source)
You can mitigate that by doing outdoor dungeons, but it's easy to overdo those. (Source)Why can't the scenario team work on dungeons instead? Can't stand scenarios as healer; even in guild as disc.
Good dungeons require a lot of art. (Source)

ICC had new boss models, a lot of arche AND dungs. And you were going to hire more people since 4 years ago
We could only do that because the previous tier had a rather small raid and dungeon (that are not universally loved). (Source)
We could delay patches more in order to have more content per patch. Not sure that's the right answer either. (Source)
Could also hire more, which we are trying to do. That's a slow solution though unless you're willing to sacrifice quality. (Source)Couldn't you combine Scenarios with 5 man logic and use existing environment? Same for raids?
We could, yes. Concern would be that players may view that as rehashed content and not the "real" dungeons they were looking for. (Source)

I hope you guys understand the no new 5 mans announcement, non-queueing for heroic scenarios, etc. drive away casual players.
We're not sure that just 1-3 new dungeons provides content for players for very long. Even Magister's I didn't run 30-40 times. (Source)

tri-spec won't happen, fine... Where are the proving grounds? A whisper in the wind.
Working on them. But when we talk about unannounced features too much they tend to become "promises." Just the way it goes. (Source)

Why not use scenario to show progress in the stories in EK/Kalimdor? Like scenario showing the war in Ashenvale/Gilneas?
That would be cool. Currently our scenarios are focused on recent events, but the possibility certainly exists. (Source)

Will an item level squish affect our ability to solo older content? If it doesn't, I have no problem with it.
The goal is it will not affect your ability to solo older content. (Source)Squish is useless, because it just delays the inevitable. Numbers will get out of hand again. Regular squishs inc?
Maybe? With the squish we had planned for MoP, we wouldn't need to do it again for 2-3 expansions. Every 1 might feel weird. (Source)

Any plans to impelement an in game voice communication? You need other software to play any serious pve/pvp. Isn't that weird?
Would love to do it, but it's one of those solutions that you have to get right and we certainly did not with our first attempt. (Source)

Who gives a fuck if the tanks are outdpsing everyone. You should see it as a good thing; your raid is getting a lot of extra dps making fights a lot easier. If you have a paladin tank, it's a double bonus since you have a lot of heals going out.

But no, it seems like people care more about their own ego than the actual ability of their raid as a whole, and they would rather see fights become harder as a result of tank nerfs than tanks doing high dps on tough fights.

Apparently, damage dealers are not satisfied with tanks being screwed out of Brawler's Guild and PvP.

---------- Post added 2013-05-23 at 05:08 PM ----------

If you would actually read the thread regarding the topic on the official WoW tank forums, you would see actual problems with this change. On high damage fights i.e. heroics, it may be a really big problem. It is also a much unneeded change and will only result in stamina having a much higher value (it is already the highest value stat by far for Paladins at least), and average raid dps on heroic fights becoming lower.

Tank DPS isn't free, ok? All fights are designed with the tank dps in mind. Blizzard alread said that. So if they lower tank dps, they'll balance/develop encounters for that.

What they don't want are "clever mechanics" to have more tank dps than intended, wich also generally put unecessary strain on healers (and screw their fights intended for 2 tanks wich also make one class way better than others, since that class can solo tank while the others can't. They don't want this).

---------- Post added 2013-05-23 at 12:11 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Hexz

Your paladin gearing haste has nothing to do with failing on tortos, haste is fantastic for aoe tanking, I one tank tortos as most paladins do with haste step up, it was more likely your healers failed at keeping his shield topped up.

Anyways on this topic, stupid nerf, pointless and it will actually hurt fights where you can easily gain vengeance, i mean god look at horidon, wth are we meant to do on the enrage when we are suddenly getting half the vengeance, there goes our active mitigation..

Seriously what does this stop people doing 1 Tanking Council or Megaera, its like a cheap bandage, lets just fuck over the tanks actually having fun and doing there job properly, seriously its not like people are standing there trying to take more damage on heroic encounters.

That's exactly what they don't want. "It's the healers problem! Not the tank for focusing on dps". "My class can one tank the encounter designed for two tanks, suck it other tanks". Not every tanking class can gimmick tank (ops, solo tank, ok...).

Who gives a fuck if the tanks are outdpsing everyone. You should see it as a good thing; your raid is getting a lot of extra dps making fights a lot easier. If you have a paladin tank, it's a double bonus since you have a lot of heals going out.

But no, it seems like people care more about their own ego than the actual ability of their raid as a whole, and they would rather see fights become harder as a result of tank nerfs than tanks doing high dps on tough fights.

Apparently, damage dealers are not satisfied with tanks being screwed out of Brawler's Guild and PvP

Because it is a game - its competition. What the point to play DPS class if tanks do 1.5 more damage you do? If, as you say, paladin top meters while tanking, and also provide decent healing what the point to play different class then? Lets roll paladins everyone to fill all roles in raid - this is absurd. Let current specs\classes to fulfill their role. And dont worry about raid dps drop - I bet Blizzard will compensate this somehow.

Their talk about talent trees are so stupid, these new talents are not better in anyway it's just bad.

I rarelly change my talents nowadays, basically only when changing between pve and pvp. Wich alread happened in the old system.

For pve, they just promote that by simply designing the fights the same way. Everyone will always grab a talent for increased run speed instead of a talent to slow your targets if they don't give the chance to apply slow to the mobs in there for example. You go to the guides that they talk so bad about and you read often "useless on this tier"... great "suggestions for talents are usually just breakdowns on how each one works and which ones work better in what situations"...

Please get rid of the awful vengeance system. Threat should be generated by abilities rather than damage and there is really no need for tanks to dish out the amount of damage that they currently do, especially when they have countless panic buttons, defensive abilities and self healing in addition.

My problem with the vengeance change isn´t about mechanisms... it is about GC and the devs constantly wasting dev time changing the same stupid stuff back and forth which has NO noticeable affect on the game. We have had major resilience changes with every patch this expansion, and pretty much the same thing with vengeance.. They keep wasting their time changing the same crap back and forth instead of adding cool new things. Every time they made these changes, they say it will be ´better´.. and then 3 months later, they have to gut it again.

The encounters team, and the quest team are the reason WOW is WOW.... the systems team is like a bunch of OCD idiots who can´t leave their own house because they have to check the stove every 3 seconds. How many cool new projects get pushed off the table because you guys can´t keep your hands off resilience and vengeance for more than a month?

I never liked vengeance. I was always a fan of Omen and other threat meters where DPS had to gauge their threat and balance accordingly, while the tank really had to work at managing threat. However, I think Blizzard shot themselves in the foot because of current game mechanics and enrage times. It seems they make it so the enrage timer is so tight that tank dps is required to meet the enrage and DPS has to go full out without any regard of threat. To balance this out, they'll need to adjust boss mechanics again as well.

I like the thought of the tank being a meat shield and not a dps powerhouse. That's my old school ways talking

Ultimately, i don't see any positives at all to this change. I'll be the first to admit, i hate vengeance. I hate the way it currently works, promoting taking more damage to do more damage, and if your the tank that isn't taking damage, you end up feeling like the sword in your hand is a wet noodle, tickling the boss. That said, i don't see this as the solution. Not at all surprised that once again in this expansion, 10 mans get the short end of the stick. Tank dps was already very important in 10s. :/

Vengeance is way to high. Part of being a tank is getting threat and then having to keep threat. With the way that it is now you can just bang on your keyboard and you will have threat. You play a tank to control the pace and aspects of a fight. You play a dps to do damage on a fight. Stop getting so hurt everytime a nerf comes out. People should look at it as a plus on having to play your class better.

Who gives a fuck if the tanks are outdpsing everyone. You should see it as a good thing; your raid is getting a lot of extra dps making fights a lot easier.

what kind of a fail-comment is that? why not just triple the damage from <insert dps class here>? everyone in your raid would be MORE than happy, because the raid is getting ridicoulus amounts of free DPS!

see what i did there?

---------- Post added 2013-05-23 at 03:30 PM ----------

Originally Posted by Hellhammer

the vengeance change is another stupid design decision, they should actually be beyond that after all these years *sigh

no, the only fail decision was to let tanks do the same dps (or even much more under certain conditions) than any pure dps class. it's stupid, and that's what i thought the first time i saw it. maybe they should get rid of the tanking role completely if you want to be dps classes? would that be fun? would it be good for wow?

Get rid of vengeance. I play a tank to tank. I enjoyed the fun mechanic that was threat and I enjoyed having to work for it, especially on multiple targets. Now every tanks has a spammable AOE or cleave ability which is just a bore.

Whenever I enter a dungeon on any tank, it's charge in and spam my AOE abilities to top meters and not worry about threat.

Tanking should go back to how it was. AOE abilities with semi-long cooldowns, make me tab target to get threat on multiple mobs. Make me work for the threat. 90% of fights in WoW are just "AOE ZERG" which is getting so damn boring.

Get rid of vengeance. I play a tank to tank. I enjoyed the fun mechanic that was threat and I enjoyed having to work for it, especially on multiple targets. Now every tanks has a spammable AOE or cleave ability which is just a bore.

Whenever I enter a dungeon on any tank, it's charge in and spam my AOE abilities to top meters and not worry about threat.

Tanking should go back to how it was. AOE abilities with semi-long cooldowns, make me tab target to get threat on multiple mobs. Make me work for the threat. 90% of fights in WoW are just "AOE ZERG" which is getting so damn boring.

i'm with you there! i remember the good old times when you could measure the skill of a tank by how well he was able to hold aggro, especially on multi-target fights. it made the difference between "everything under control" and "houston, we have a problem (and many dead dps+heal)". nowadays everything tanks have to do is spam their 400% boosted aoe abilities, topping the meters and not even look at threat - threat has become superflous. it was even more fun for me as a dps when i had to closely watch my aggro on the mobs. now i ignore it.

All these silly comments about going back to the old way are so incredibly.. well silly and uneducated answers really, any tank that played serious in Classic or BC, will tell you that what was required of a tank was way less then it is now, because movement was lacking massively in most encounters you used to sit there and literally control you threat that was it, of course there was cooldown control, but i mean seriously it wasn't anything amazing, i could tank then with my eyes closed.

These days sure you don't worry so much about threat once you have it, but you have so many more activate mechanics, movement, and well activate mitigation took cooldown use level to a whole new level, any good tank will tell you that the way tanking trended in wotlk and then in cata, was simply a snooze feast, i mean in cata it was a complete joke, all you had to do was worry about a tank cd here and there, and yes tank dps was behind but it wasn't overall important.

Now its such a higher class of tanking, the skill gap between the good tank and the bad tanks is clearly obviously on every single level, if you want to stand there and be a meat shield go ahead, simply put you bad, i doubt your competing in heroic progression guilds, and if you are your probably holding the guild back because no smart player in there right mind would want to go back to the old style, tanking is a rush now, if the great tanks in classic and bc had a choice, they would hands down pick this style of tanking.

if you wanted tanks to just be meat shields, hey lets not stop the idiocy there, lets make healers unable to do any sort of damage ability well in healing spec, heals only, and also lets remove all dps defensive cooldowns, they don't need them they are not meant to take damage, its the healers jobs to use cooldowns to save them not the dps..

hell lets just go back to classic style of raiding, that shit was really hard..... no it wasn't it was great back then but in all honestly any smart player that raided back then will tell you , guess what it was nothing on the encounters made now, it was a hell of a lot more buggy and there wasn't exactly any complex rotation.

ignorance is a great thing, many of the people in this thread have it and it ruins wow.

they gave us vengeance to increase skill caps of tanks and make use viable in raids, we build our guilds, our raids around it, they change it now suddenly everything needs to be rebuilt and you are going to lose a massive chunk of tanks in wow.

i'm with you there! i remember the good old times when you could measure the skill of a tank by how well he was able to hold aggro, especially on multi-target fights. it made the difference between "everything under control" and "houston, we have a problem (and many dead dps+heal)". nowadays everything tanks have to do is spam their 400% boosted aoe abilities, topping the meters and not even look at threat - threat has become superflous. it was even more fun for me as a dps when i had to closely watch my aggro on the mobs. now i ignore it.

Well for a while the initial goal was to make tanking easier in the threat department so that a new tank would not hold dps back and get more players tanking. That then left tanks with not much to do and Blizzard went hey how about we make tanks actively manage their avoidance and mitigation which then places more strain on healers if there is a new or not so skilled tank. It is less noticeable to the majority of the group if the tank sucks with active mitigation but make them responsible of threat and the whole raid knows. Blizzard can mask a problem but in the end someone still gets screwed =(

Get rid of vengeance. I play a tank to tank. I enjoyed the fun mechanic that was threat and I enjoyed having to work for it, especially on multiple targets. Now every tanks has a spammable AOE or cleave ability which is just a bore.

Whenever I enter a dungeon on any tank, it's charge in and spam my AOE abilities to top meters and not worry about threat.

Tanking should go back to how it was. AOE abilities with semi-long cooldowns, make me tab target to get threat on multiple mobs. Make me work for the threat. 90% of fights in WoW are just "AOE ZERG" which is getting so damn boring.

No? The butt-clinching threat issues of classic-BC is what made tanks so hard to find. If you enjoy always being near losing threat and potentially killing a DPS, then there is something wrong with you.

vengeance is (and always will be) a very crappy solution to tank threat generation.

rather then giving tanks extra dps via a mechanic that encourage people to take damage, they should return to aggro multiplier based abilities. and balance fights around the fact you have 2 tanks in raid (btw, someone teach GC basic math please, 2/5 is not 1 to 4 (going by the standard 2 tanks 5 dps 3 healers 10 man usually is), and 2/17 is not 1 to 7 (going by, 2 tanks, 17 dps and 6 healers 25 man usually is)
this will also solve the always present issue of tank swapping forcing the swapped tank to either stop dps or ask a paladin for salvation.

as for the fights you can cheese with 1 tank, there are very easy solutions, make debuffs undispellable (horridon stacks should not be reset by paladin abilities, emperor's p3 debuff shouldn't be kitable to drop off etc), ensure that high stacking is extremly damaging (100% increments are not out of line), do more empress style debuffs (stack it too high and you'r out) just to give a few examples.

tanking is fun, and people should enjoy tanking for the actual role (holding bosses and adds off healer and dps), if you want to top meters, you should roll dps.

Originally Posted by Rixark

No? The butt-clinching threat issues of classic-BC is what made tanks so hard to find. If you enjoy always being near losing threat and potentially killing a DPS, then there is something wrong with you.

i played a tank since vanilla, i can tell you that i never lost threat to a dps with 2 brain cells at the beginning of the fight, and unless a boss had threat wiping mechanic i never lost threat afterwards.
having a threat ceiling for dps was a good thing, it forced dps to use abilities in an intelligent manner rather then mash buttons as fast as possible and use mind numbing rotations, it made BC hunters and rogues pay attention (MD/tricks anyone?), it forced dps to actually pay attention and use their de-aggro abilities (when was the last time you saw a rogue vanish? mage invis? lock Soul shatter? hunter FD?) and it also forced tanks to work their abilities to maximize threat. these days if you manage to take aggro from a tank after the initial burst he's either DC or autoattacking and eating a sandwich (and even then, lol).

We have paladin tank in our guild that stacked haste like no tomorrow. We actually disenchanted any item with "tanking stats" on it! He even claimed priority on horidon's heroic trinket! You know... the haste one? Well, we reached tortos... and guess what? His haste setup was not that good against aoe tanking. And we could not use him there effectively. I can sure say that he can shove his precious dps gear up his ... a$$

He was doing something very wrong there. I've been in raids where a prot pally would solo tank bats and the boss in a haste setup. Heroic Tortos, not normal. Or it's your healers failing to keep his shield topped off, or him failing to shield at the right times.

And I will admit, certain classes do probably scale too well with vengeance (I'm talking about my own class here and pallies).

Their talk about talent trees are so stupid, these new talents are not better in anyway it's just bad.

I agree, but you might as well be talking to the wall. Ghostcrawler is pretty obviously in love with "his" talent system and equally obviously completely clueless about the state of the game. We're not going to see a decent talent system until he's gone. (Fortunately, if sub numbers continue to behave like the naval vessel with the same name, we may see that sooner rather than later.)